Nearly 50% of all Blacks and Latinos have low wage "McJobs." From [HERE] The burgeoning battle between fast-food chain (servitude) workers and their employers over low wages and benefits was ratcheted up a notch, this week, with the leak of a phone conversation from a McDonald’s employee helpline in which a longtime employee was advised to go on food stamps in order to make ends meet.

Fast-food employee advocacy group Low Pay Is Not OK posted a video on its website on Wednesday featuring a recording of a phone call made by McDonald’s employee Nancy Salgado to McResource, a phone line for McDonald’s employees to call for information about housing, child care and other resources.

Salgado, 27, a single mother of two children, has worked full-time at McDonald’s for the last decade but says she has never received a raise from her $8.25 an hour salary, the minimum wage in Chicago, where she lives.

She was having difficulty paying her bills and feeding her kids, so when she heard about the McResource phone line at a recent meeting with her fellow employees, “it caught my attention,” she told Al Jazeera in a phone interview. “I need help, so I wanted to see what kind of help they can provide for me.”

Salgado said she wanted to record the phone call – she disclosed this to the representative who answered her call, who said that was fine – and asked about how she might obtain medical benefits or get help paying her heating bill. She also told the representative, who asked whether Salgado had children, that she was “rationing food” in order to feed her kids.

The representative offered to connect Salgado with a number of federal benefit programs for which she was eligible, including Medicaid, a medical care program for low-income adults and their kids, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), otherwise known as food stamps.

Salgado said she was surprised the company advised her to seek government benefits, and didn’t address her current salary or benefits situation.  “I feel very angry. I wasn’t expecting to get the number for government assistance,” she said. “I was expecting they’d give me some other kind of answer.”

She added, “I believe that I work for one of the richest companies that can afford to pay better wages to their workers.”